My first evening on Prince Edward Island, I find myself on the shore, scrambling across sun-bleached beach grass to circle an abandoned lighthouse. The Gulf of St. Lawrence crashes in moody bursts before me, the water reflecting the deepening gray of the sky. My feet sink into drifts of sand until I turn inland, down a spongy red clay road that edges a verdant meadow. In the distance, the cheerful lights of my bed-and-breakfast, a rambling 19th-Century farmhouse, beckons.

Less than an hour earlier, I was driving past a spangly strip of tourist attractions . . . miniature golf courses, water theme parks . . . that promised “family fun” with suspicious exuberance. But on this country lane, with the roar of the gulf filling my ears, I can almost imagine myself a solitary traveller and not one of the thousands of tourists who flock every year to the green gabled house just a few miles from where I stand.

I came to this Canadian island to follow in the footsteps of L.M. Montgomery, who made her island home famous with her novel Anne of Green Gables.

An instant best-seller when it was published in 1908, the book tells the story of the verbose, red-haired Anne Shirley, an 11-year-old orphan who is accidentally sent to a to live with a middle-aged brother and sister to help with their farm. She is not the boy they had asked for. Starved for love, with a vibrant imagination and a knack for comic mishap, the character of Anne has charmed readers for more than a century. Mark Twain proclaimed her “the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.”

The book, which has sold more than 50 million copies, has been translated into at least 20 languages. It started Lucy Maud Montgomery’s career. Today, it anchors the island’s multimillion-dollar tourist industry. Summer musical performances, gift shops, house museums, horse-drawn carriage rides, a mock village — all are devoted to scenes and characters from the book and its seven sequels.

I have wanted to visit Prince Edward Island since my childhood, when I devoured both Montgomery’s accounts of Anne’s escapades and the author’s descriptions of the island’s beauty. The landscape of “ruby, and emerald, and sapphire,” as she described it in her copious journals, is as much a character in the book as Anne is. It is a temple of woods, fields and shore, where the sunset sky shines “like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle.”

I worried that the onslaught of Anne fans would have ruined the island’s secluded charm. But, as I discovered during a trip in late May, it’s still possible to glimpse Montgomery’s island, to wander its red clay lanes and dappled woodland copses, to admire the farms fronting the silvery sea. You just have to know where to look.

Maud, as Montgomery was known, grew up in the rural community of Cavendish, on the north shore of the crescent-shaped island, a solitary child raised by her maternal grandparents on their homestead farm. As was her famous heroine, she was abandoned as a child; her mother died of tuberculosis before her second birthday and her father moved to Saskatchewan and remarried.

The girl often escaped her elderly grandparents’ strict household by “fishing in the brooks, picking gum in the spruce copses, berrying in the stumps and gypsying to the shore.”

She later used this idyllic landscape for her fiction. She renamed the area Avonlea, and borrowed it as a setting the neighbouring farmhouse of her cousins, an older brother-sister pair reminiscent of the book’s Matthew and Marilla.

In 1937, Green Gables and its surrounding area became Prince Edward Island National Park. Child-friendly attractions cropped up nearby. Preserved as a historic site, the house welcomes more than 125,000 visitors each year. About a fifth of these are from Japan, where the book is a cultural phenomenon. Many dress up like Anne, and don pinafores and straw hats adorned with red braids.

Decorated in stiff Victorian furniture, the house’s reconstructed rooms reflect the book with faithful accuracy. They are scattered with details easily recognized by fans: a black lace shawl spread across Marilla’s bed; a brown, puffed-sleeve dress hung on the closet door of Anne’s room.

I stand for a long time in Anne’s doorway, gazing at the flowered wallpaper, low white bed and fluttering green muslin curtains.

The east gable room, indeed, the entire house, is so exactly as I’d pictured it during my many readings of the book, I feel a pang of nostalgia for my own childhood.

Outside, the farmyard, in the form its depictions of 19th-Century rural life, particularly gruelling in the harsh Canadian Maritimes climate, and its incongruous surroundings, jolts me back to reality. An 18-hole golf course now spreads over the former woods and farmland that abutted the home; the drone of a lawn mower accompanies my walk through the manicured grove of trees recreated as the book’s “Haunted Wood,” and, instead of the wailing ghost of Anne’s imagination, I meet golfers.

At the other end of the Haunted Wood trail, I find the remains of the author’s childhood home, now named the Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Cavendish Home. Here, she wrote Anne of Green Gables, at the age of 31, while she was living with her widowed grandmother. The object of a bitter inheritance dispute, the house fell to ruin after the death of the grandmother. Today, only the stone foundation remains.

I stroll the grounds, which are lovingly maintained by a branch of Montgomery’s family. I admire a fragile old apple tree. “I loved the trees around my old home with a personal love,” Montgomery wrote in her memoir, The Alpine Path. I pause at the spot where her bedroom window once stood. Through a screen of spruce trees, past fields and meadows, I glimpse her beloved gulf, “a tiny blue gap between distant hills.”

As I look at the scrap of sea, I feel as if I am viewing Montgomery’s island. I savour the slivers of beauty I glimpse between sights of the carnival-style attractions that pepper Cavendish.

As I venture farther afield in my rental car, the island’s splendour opens up to me. From the descriptions I’ve read so many times in Montgomery’s books, it feels familiar: the “fringing groves of fir and maple,” the ponds, “so long and winding,” the red roads that “wound like gay satin ribbons in and among green fields.”

I turn off one highway, down a clay road edged by towering spruce trees, and stop at the edge of a field “starred with hundreds of dandelions,” as the author described one in her journals. As far as my eye can see, there is only farmland, interlocking patches of red plowed fields and green meadows dotted with solitary farmhouses. It’s a view that appears lifted from the books.

As I explore the area west of Cavendish, and small communities such as French River, Park Corner and North Granville, I realize I need only a bit of imagination to picture Anne beside me. Any of these dirt roads could be “Lovers’ Lane,” the secluded cow path where Anne liked to think out loud; any of the farmhouses her Green Gables; any of the sun-splashed ponds her “Lake of Shining Waters.”

In 1911, Montgomery married a minister, Ewan Macdonald, and moved to Ontario. Although she visited Prince Edward Island regularly, she never again lived there. Yet her beloved home continued to inspire her; she set 19 of her 20 novels there and it remained her refuge through a life darkened by depression.

She would not recognize today’s Cavendish. It is no longer the “haunt of ancient peace,” as she described it in Anne of Green Gables.

EATING: Blue Winds Tearoom (Route 6, New London; bluewindstearoom.blogspot.com). Inspired by the Montgomery books, Terry Kamikawa, the owner, moved to the island from Japan in 1988. She prepares dainty sandwiches and, using Montgomery’s recipe, a lemony New Moon pudding.

The Home Place Inn and Restaurant (21 Victoria St., Kensington; thehomeplace.ca). Old-fashioned fare such as potato-and-salt-cod cakes served with house-made pickled chowchow, or succulent pan-fried oysters.

If You Go

Read the books beforehand!

The descriptions will spring to mind as you see the sights

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